10 min readNeural Networks
What Actually Makes Training Converge
A two per cent change in the learning rate separates a converged run from one five orders of magnitude away, a condition number predicts the convergence rate to six decimal places, and stochastic gradient descent with a fixed step never converges at all - it settles into a ball whose radius grows as the square root of the step. Every figure here was computed on a problem whose exact optimum is known.
OptimizationDeep LearningMachine Learning